Down in the polls, Joe Biden’s team hopes Donald Trump’s felony conviction will kick off a month of contrasts that could reframe the race.
It didn’t take a political super-junkie to see that Joe Biden’s campaign was shifting strategy when it showed up outside the Manhattan courthouse on Tuesday with Robert De Niro and a pair of police officers who protected the Capitol on January 6. Joined by the campaign’s communications director, the trio sprinted away from the president’s previous insistence that his political machine remain silent about Donald Trump’s trial. The cops painted Trump as unfit for office and De Niro plainly tried baiting him into a messy back-and-forth, largely around the idea that Trump had lost his mind after the 2020 election. Gone, apparently, was the Democrats’ concern about playing into the ex-president’s claims of political prosecution and their hope to appear above Trump’s sordid legal messes. At the very least, the brain trust in Delaware clearly calculated that, with their candidate stuck in a political rut five months from Election Day and with the jury about to deliberate — still two days away from finding Trump guilty on all counts — those risks were worth the reward: a rare slice of attention during the biggest show of the season, and thus another chance to try focusing voter minds on the fundamental choice facing them this fall.
For months now, Biden’s allies have responded to liberal gloom over him trailing in the polls against Trump by arguing that it will improve once semi-engaged Americans finally come to terms with the reality that they will effectively have a binary decision to make between Biden and Trump. Yet neither Trump’s easy GOP-primary victory nor the heavily covered trial itself forced that realization or caused a clear polling bump for Biden, nor has the tens of millions of dollars’ worth of advertising the Biden camp has recently poured into swing states. At least not yet. Biden troops are, of course, hopeful that the historic guilty verdict — and their new ability to call Trump a convicted felon — could help their cause. (For what it’s worth, Trump’s price immediately dove on election betting markets.) But they have evidently determined that no matter what, they must turn the first month of this summer into a period of attention seeking that reminds Americans specifically of Trump’s lawlessness and chaos.
In the campaign’s first statement after the verdict, it offered a reminder. “Today’s verdict does not change the fact that the American people face a simple reality. There is still only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: at the ballot box. Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president,” said communications director Michael Tyler. “The threat Trump poses to our democracy has never been greater. He is running an increasingly unhinged campaign of revenge and retribution, pledging to be a dictator ‘on day one’ and calling for our Constitution to be ‘terminated’ so he can regain and keep power.
